1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a device for continuously treating wire to be favorably used when various treatment is applied to the wire, such as for example, surface treatment, working treatment, and the like, as combined in a continuous process.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A wire, or metal wire, is often treated by an inline system including more than two treating processes. However, it is often necessary to provide for a substantial treating time for particular kinds of treatment, and in such cases, it is therefore very inconvenient in view of the space requirement and management of the treatment to cause the wire to proceed in a linear path.
Conventionally, various kinds of devices have been proposed for solving the aforementioned inconvenience by making the wire stay around for a predetermined period of time, such as diclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,098,109 and 3,050,267 or U.K. Pat. No. 928,435. All of these techniques employ a drum for winding up a proceding wire to cause it to remain wound thereabout for a predetermined treating time. However, the wire storing drums employed in these conventional techniques are all driven by their own driving means and, in this connection, they are bound with a serious disadvantage in that the device for controlling the driving means to operate in perfect harmony with the proceeding of the treating processes becomes very expensive.
On the other hand, in another conventional technique which employs a wire storing drum not equipped with its own driving means, the wire is usually wound around a single drum. However, in such single drum systems, the amount of the wire to be wound around the drum is relatively limited. In more detail, referring to FIG. 1 showing a single drum system, the wire at the side leading out from the drum is applied with a tension T2, while the wire at the side of the drum leading thereinto is applied with a tension T1 which is comparable with the tension T2. Since the wire is wound around the drum under the application of a relatively high tension, the friction between the windings of the wire and the drum is relatively high. Therefore, if a large amount of wire is wound around the drum, the windings laid upon the drum cannot shift from one end of the drum to the other, whereby the newly wound windings are laid over the preceding windings making it impossible to continue normal operation of the wire storing drum. It might be considered to form the winding up drum in a relatively steeply tapered fashion to meet with such inconvenience and to increase the storing amount of the single drum system, but in this case, slippage between the wire and drum becomes very large causing serious wearing of the drum so that it cannot stand long periods of operation.